It was not till the Christian period that it became otherwise. In the development of Christianity Africa plays the very first part; if it arose in Syria, it was in and through Africa that it became the religion for the world. As the translation of the sacred books from the Hebrew language into the Greek, and that into the popular language of the most considerable Jewish community out of Judaea, gave to Judaism its position in the world, so in a similar way for the transference of Christianity from the serving East to the ruling West the translation of its confessional writings into the language of the West became of decisive importance; and this all the more, inasmuch as these books were translated, not into the language of the cultivated circles of the West, which early disappeared from common life and in the imperial age was everywhere a matter of scholastic attainment, but into the decomposed Latin already preparing the way for the structure of the Romance languages--the Latin of common intercourse at that time familiar to the great masses. If Christianity was by the destruction of the Jewish church-state released from its Jewish basis (p. 229), it became the religion of the world by the fact, that in the great world-empire it began to speak the universally current imperial language; and those nameless men, who since the second century Latinised the Christian writings, performed for this epoch just such a service, as at the present day, in the heightened measure required by the enlarged horizon of the nations, is carried out in the footsteps of Luther by the Bible Societies. And these men were in part Italians, but above all Africans.[307] In Africa to all appearance the knowledge of Greek, which is able to dispense with translations, was far more seldom to be met with than at least in Rome; and, on the other hand, the Oriental element, that preponderated particularly in the early stages of Christianity, here found a readier reception than in the other Latin-speaking lands of the West. Even as regards the polemic literature called especially into existence by the new faith, since the Roman church at this epoch belonged to the Greek circle (p. 226), Africa took the lead in the Latin tongue. The whole Christian authorship down to the end of this period is, so far as it is Latin, African; Tertullian and Cyprian were from Carthage, Arnobius from Sicca, Lactantius, and probably in like manner Minucius Felix, were, in spite of their classic Latin, Africans, and not less the already mentioned somewhat later Augustine. In Africa the growing church found its most zealous confessors and its most gifted defenders. For the literary conflict of the faith Africa furnished by far the most and the ablest combatants, whose special characteristics, now in eloquent discussion, now in witty ridicule of fables, now in vehement indignation, found a true and mighty field for their display in the onslaught on the old gods. A mind--intoxicated first by the whirl of